Letter from the Editor: Shame on The College Board

DANIEL DASSOW Editor-in-Chief

It is insufficient to state that The College Board, the non-profit organization which creates Advanced Placement courses for high school students, should not have removed key theories and ideas in Black history from the required curriculum of their new African American Studies course.

The College Board should never have met with the administration of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to begin with, and it should never collaborate with any state government so invested in erasing pillars of Black intellectual history. Shame on the College Board for doing so.

When the Florida Board of Education published a year’s worth of exchanges with The College Board on Feb. 7, it became clear that the Board had hidden the extent of their deliberations with the state from the public. It was also clear the state was not going to allow the course into public schools without “revisions,” a major threat from the nation’s third most populous state.

Months later, the latest version of the curriculum has been revised to remove concepts like intersectionality and police brutality, as well as movements like Black Lives Matter and the call for reparations for the descendants of enslaved people.

In a letter from The College Board published Feb. 11, the organization repeated the claim that the changes were made to create more historical balance in the curriculum.

“Contemporary events like the Black Lives Matter movement, reparations, and mass incarceration were optional topics in the pilot course,” the Board said. “Our lack of clarity allowed the narrative to arise that political forces had ‘downgraded’ the role of these contemporary movements and debates in the AP class.” Reparations is a contemporary debate? This is news to every scholar of Black history, who know that reparations have been at the center of Black politics and scholarship since emancipation.

“Our failure to raise our voice betrayed Black scholars everywhere and those who have long toiled to build this remarkable field,” the letter said.

It was a stunning admission from an organization that was trying to remain defiant as the odds stacked against them.

Of course, if the Board had refused to meet with the DeSantis administration, it is all but inevitable Florida would have banned the Black Studies course, which is a shame. But an integral part of the American political system is facing the consequences of your electoral choices. If you elect a politician who wants to scrub Black history in order to defang white supremacy and ensure its continuance, then that is what you will get.

These consequences are what keep elections turning. By paring down the course into a form acceptable to Republican politicians, the Board has increased these politicians’ chances of reelection. They have made a conservative political statement by involving themselves in these talks and changing the course, no matter their claim that these two things were not connected.

You cannot look the American public in the face and say that removing reparations, Black Lives Matter, critical race theory and queer theory is not a political decision.

You cannot say that these ideas are “contemporary” without explicitly erasing centuries of Black queer experience and Black political and scholarly activism.

Students will not get the full picture of Black history in this course because the Board gave into political pressure.

When I was a junior in high school, my AP English Language and Composition teacher assigned us a project called “Hyphenated America,” where we could closely read and analyze a text of our choice written by an author with a hyphenated identity, such as Asian-American or African-American.

Set aside the fact that these hyphens have come under scrutiny and are now largely unused. I was able to study Ta-Nehisi Coates’s landmark essay collection “We Were Eight Years in Power,” and it transformed the way I think about race in American history. To be clear: this transformation is what DeSantis and his supporters are afraid of.

In my essay, I concluded that Coates was no new James Baldwin, as some had asserted. Baldwin’s hope for America was tough and complex and scarred by white racist violence, but it was there nonetheless, and his hope is what made him remarkable. Coates, on the other hand, had all but given up on America, and had made hopelessness part of his ethos as a public intellectual.

Ron DeSantis does not take issue with Ta-Nehisi Coates’s hopelessness. He takes issue with Coates’s fierce honesty about everything white American voters and their elected representatives have taken from Black people since the end of legal enslavement.

He takes issue with the fact that these historical truths make certain demands of white people in the 21st century and that these demands are political.

These laws are not about protecting the truth. They are about protecting white people from the truth. They are about predominantly white governments suppressing the voice of Black scholars and writers who have demanded that the U.S. take political action to repair the savage legacy of chattel slavery which continues to affect outcomes for Black Americans today.

Of course it matters that the AP course exists in the first place. But in this instance, it is not true that any course is better than no course. This Black History Month, let’s remember that the only truthful telling of Black history is the full one, and let’s dispel with the notion that The College Board, who also administers the SAT test, is a politically unaffiliated organization. They have affiliated themselves in brazen ways, and we are seeing the effects of that choice.